What funders actually fund, and why winning grants isn't your only answer
Apply to a funder you already have a relationship with, and you might see a success rate of up to 30%. Apply cold, to someone who’s never heard of you, it’s most likely to be below 10%.
At the top end, the numbers are pretty unforgiving. Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, one of the largest funders in arts and culture, funded around 15% of all initial enquiries it received in 2025. Less than a third of those awarded funding were new to them. Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants, the route most emerging and scaling arts organisations actually use, funds roughly three applications in ten for awards under £30,000, and demand for that fund rose almost 10% in a single year.
Funders don’t fund the best applications. They fund the clearest cases. When the pool is this competitive, clarity on who you are and what you exist to do isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s essential.
What funders are actually assessing
When a funder reads an application, they’re making judgements that go beyond whether the project sounds good. These judgments sound like - Does this organisation know what it’s doing and why? If they run this activity, will it plausibly lead to the outcome they’re claiming? Is there a real relationship between the budget and the ambition?
A strong application makes those questions easy to answer. A weak one creates doubt, even when the programme itself is strong. And when a funder is making decisions between projects and organisations with paper thin differences, there’s no room for doubts.
The organisations that succeed most share a few things. They’ve done the strategic thinking before the application opens, so they’re writing from clarity rather than working it out as they write. They know their track record well enough to use it as evidence, not aspiration. They’re specific about the problem, who benefits, and what changes as a result.
That specificity is what a lot of applications lack. Under deadline pressure, it’s tempting to write broadly, to appeal to whatever the funder’s criteria say. Funders can feel the difference. The logic gets vague. The numbers turn approximate. The outcomes stop being specific, because they were retrofitted to criteria instead of designed from the work. We see this surprisingly often.
A better case still isn’t the whole answer
There’s a harder reality too. Even an organisation that gets genuinely good at winning applications is still structurally exposed, if grants make up most of its income.
Research into why UK charities actually close found something more precise than lack of income diversity. It isn’t how concentrated your income is that predicts closure. It’s how much of it comes from grants specifically. Charities that survived relied on grants for under a quarter of their income, on average. Charities that closed relied on grants for around 60%. Over 70% of the charities that closed got more than 70% of their income from grants. At least half of the ones still standing got less than 10% from grants.
This isn’t exactly surprising when you look at the data on funding decline and competitiveness, particularly for creative activities.
And it’s not an argument against ever applying for funding. The organisations we work with know this problem acutely, they’re just not yet positioned for the kind of income diversification that will be needed for future sustainability. So right now, grant funding is still very needed.
It is though, an argument against funding ever being the whole plan. The organisations best placed for what’s coming aren’t the ones who’ve mastered the application. They’re the ones who’ve built income that doesn’t depend on grant funding success alone.
Sometimes the answer isn’t a sharper case or a more diverse income mix. It’s doing less, deliberately. Gone are the days where continual growth can be the expectation, for a while at least.
UK charity mergers were up 90% last year. That’s a bigger conversation, so we’ll come back to it properly soon. For now: if that’s a conversation you’re having internally, that’s not a sign of failure. You might be the one that’s being honest and brave.
The conversation that changes applications
In our work with creative organisations on funding bids, the most valuable conversation rarely happens on the application itself. It happens before the first word is written. What are we actually asking this funder to invest in? What’s the evidence we’re the right organisation to do it? How does this project fit into our income strategy? Does it, does it actually fit the strategy?
That last question is an uncomfortable one. Some applications that feel urgent are worth writing. Others reveal that you’re chasing funding for something that doesn’t fit your strategy, but because it’s what’s available right now, and we “need to get the money in”. Knowing the difference is worth the honest thinking before a month of writing.
What good support looks like
Support that only improves the writing tends to produce more polished applications with the same underlying weaknesses. Support that works on the strategy, the writing, and the income model together tends to produce applications that are stronger, faster to write, and part of a plan that doesn’t collapse if one of them doesn’t succeed.
If you’re planning applications for the autumn funding season, we’re working with a small number of organisations on exactly this: the strategic preparation, the writing, and the wider income picture it sits inside. We start with a free call, about an hour, to understand what’s actually going on and where we might be able to help. Sometimes that’s enough on its own, but often it leads to a proposal for working together. No obligation either way.
BOOK A STRATEGY CALL
And if you want a quick, honest check on where your fundraising actually stands before you commit to anything, our Fundraising Readiness Scorecard takes about five minutes and covers the five areas that tend to matter most: income diversity, funder relationships, application readiness, strategic clarity, and internal capacity.
FUNDRAISING READINESS SCORECARD
Sources for the stats in this post
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation ~14.86% of enquiries funded (2025): via: Overview of grant funding 2025 | Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grants ~30–31% success rate (under £30k, 2023/24 & 2024/25) and ~10% rise in demand: ACE National Investment Dashboard
Grant-dependence and charity closure findings: Financial Resilience, Income Dependence and Organisational Survival in UK Charities, VOLUNTAS, via Cambridge Core — peer-reviewed, UK charities broadly, not arts-specific
UK charity mergers up 90% (174 to 331, 2023–2024): RSM UK, based on Charity Commission data.
